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The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery is a small packaging microbrewery in Farmville, North Carolina, that sold its first beer in August 2004. It specializes in beautiful, delicious full-flavored dark beers. These beers are highly rated and hard to find because they are so highly coveted.

The Duck-Rabbit Porter is very dark in color. This robust porter has a pronounced flavor of roasted grains reminiscent of dark chocolate. The brewers add oats to the grist to give a subtle round silkiness to the mouthfeel. You can be confident that you’ll love this impressive porter.

The Kernel Brewery in London states, “The brewery springs from the need to have more good beer. Beer deserving of a certain attention. Beer that forces you to confront and consider what you are drinking. Upfront hops, lingering bitternesses, warming alcohols, bodies of malt. Lengths and depths of flavor. We make Pale Ales, India Pale Ales and old school London Porters and Stouts towards these ends. Bottled alive, to give them time to grow.”

How can you not like a brewer who writes like that? In 2010, Evin O’Riordain, a homebrewer and cheese salesman, founded the brewery. It is tucked away in London within the arches under the railway that leads out of London Bridge. O’Riordain and his crew are beer enthusiasts and make everything, including American-style hoppy IPAs, saisons, and classic London porters and stouts.

This is a huge stout that is complete with cocoa, mocha, cassis and cherry, figs, and exotic spice. It’s got grip and body and heft. It is as good a handcrafted stout as one can find in London. Beer geeks who make geek beers for beer geeks; that’s The Kernel, and that is why you should try this beer.

The beer is an opaque black with a tan head. The body is rich and thick and unctuous, with lovely lacing. It tastes like coffee smoothed out with chocolate and cocoa. It is a big, gorgeous beer.

As always at Maine Beer Company in Freeport, Maine, there is a story behind the beer. Titus was a bold silverback gorilla that led with its heart. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International studies and protects these magnificent animals in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda, and the Maine Beer Company proudly supports their efforts.

This 7.5% ABV beer is the brewery’s take on an American robust porter. Made with American two-row, Caramel 40L, Caramel 80L, Munich 10L, chocolate, roasted wheat, and flaked oats malts, it is hopped with Centennial and Columbus for complexity and good balance. It is dark, thick, chewy, chocolaty, and generously hopped. This is an amazing giant silverback of a beer, appropriately named.